I paid my Veterans Day respects a few weeks early this year.
I swung by Santa Barbara’s Calvary Cemetery and visited two of the men who taught me the game of baseball, and so much more.
One was Philip Patton, a sailor who pulled his duty as an electrician’s mate in the U.S. Navy.
He shipped out to the South Pacific as a radio operator aboard the USS Zellars during the final year of World War II.
He considered the destroyer’s serial number of DD-777 to be his good luck, having lived through a kamikaze attack off Okinawa that killed 42 of his shipmates and wounded 45 others.
A few months later, he was medivacked to a hospital on mainland Mexico to save him from a near-fatal case of scarlet fever.
Seaman 1st Class Patton survived both crises and returned home to become the sports editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, my father … and my favorite partner in a game of catch.
But my recent trip to Calvary also rekindled memories of a neighbor named Glenn.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army right after coaching my team in the City of Santa Barbara ’s youth baseball program.
My teammates and I were squirrely junior high kids who marched mindlessly to the beats of our own drummers.
Herding squirrels would’ve been easier for Glenn and the other young men who coached our age division.
It was called “Midget League” at that time. The city renamed it a few years later after receiving complaints about its political incorrectness.
Coach Glenn soon found himself in a confusing war that was even more politically incorrect.
One day, I was fielding his ground balls while listening to him chirp about the proper positioning and footwork of a shortstop.
The next, he was shipping off to Vietnam.
I recently found Glenn, as always, resting in peace just a few yards from Dad.
By Any Other Name
Many years ago, I’d sometimes see him after getting the monthly allowance I’d earned from yardwork.
Glenn would be in his driveway, washing or tinkering with his car, as I walked past in my monthly ritual to buy baseball cards at a nearby store.
He was the All-America teen. An athlete. A decorated Boy Scout. He looked like the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Glenn would occasionally ask for a peep at my baseball cards on my return home.
His eyes once lit up when he saw the card of the Cincinnati Reds’ star who shared his last name.
“Hey, Pete Rose!” he said with a laugh. “My long-lost brother!”
Santa Barbara didn’t have Little League in the 1960s. Those of us who dreamed about becoming the next Pete Rose had to settle for a no-frills city Parks & Recreation program.
We relied on the goodness of the local high school and college players — guys like Glenn — to volunteer as our coaches.
I had been the shortstop of a Pee Wee League team that won the City Championship in 1965.
But a few years later, my Midget League team languished well down in the standings.
Coach Glenn never chided us about our failures. The only names he ever called us were Buddy and Pal.
We played our games at La Cumbre Junior High School, where several of the baseball diamonds had been chalked out on its grass field.
A hill served as the left-field barrier for one of them. Anything that landed there was a home run.
It was a short distance, even for a 13-year-old, banjo-hitting, baseball-card nerd.
That didn’t stop me from high-stepping down the baseline and shrieking like a banshee the first time I launched one onto the embankment.
Coach Glenn frowned in silence as I gloated my way around the bases.
The next time up, I swung from the ankles while trying to jerk another homer.
The ball popped up harmlessly to the pitcher.
As I returned to the bench, I heard Coach Glenn say, “If I were that guy, I’d be one now whooping and hollering like a lunatic.”
His message stuck with me. Sportsmanship matters.
Pressure Point
He asked me to pitch several times that season. I fended off his requests through most of the summer.
“Who needs that kind of pressure?” I’d say.
“C’mon, it’ll be fun,” Coach Glenn would counter. “You know, pressure is just something you put on yourself.”
And so I finally took the ball and gave it a whirl.
I can’t recall how well I did, or even if we won the game, but I clearly remember enjoying myself.
I didn’t see Coach Glenn for a long time after that summer. I heard that he’d been sent to Vietnam, but so had a lot of boys from town.
One was the son of Caesar Uyesaka, president of the Santa Barbara Dodgers minor-league baseball club.
Bobby Uyesaka was killed along with 16 of his Green Beret brothers when their forward operating base was overrun by three sapper companies of the North Vietnamese army.
Caesar was one of Dad’s best friends.
He’d bring his wife, Reiko, sons Bobby and Paul, and daughter Linda to our house every Christmas Eve and deliver presents to all seven Patton kids.
Bobby’s death weighed very heavy in our home.
I was thrilled and relieved one day to see that Glenn had survived Vietnam.
I found him resting in a lounge chair at a local swimming pool.
“Hey, coach! I didn’t know you were back! Welcome home!” I gushed while running up with an extended hand.
Glenn didn’t look up. He didn’t offer his hand. He just sat there, staring ahead through glazed eyes at … what?
“What’s up?” I said a lot more softly.
He still said nothing. He neither saw nor heard me. He was somewhere else.
Autumn Leaves
My father died not long after that, in October 1971.
He had survived the massive naval battle off Okinawa — one in which 36 other American ships were sunk and 334 were damaged — and then won his bout with scarlet fever.
But cancer got him at the age of 45.
Just a month later, I was still adrift in a maelstrom of sadness and disbelief and anger when I saw police cars gathering at the top of the street.
Something happened at the Rose house.
It took a while for the details to emerge, but another neighbor finally delivered the grim news.
“Glenn is dead,” he said.
“Apparently, he just cracked,” he continued. “Went berserk. I heard his dad finally had to shoot him.”
I couldn’t connect this account to my memories of the kindly, thoughtful, volunteer coach who never even raised his voice to his players.
His words came rushing back to me. Pressure is just something you put on yourself.
Coach Glenn was buried, with no fanfare, next to a sailor from a very different war.
I kept looking in the newspaper for Glenn’s obituary, but it never came.
Nothing was written about the many awards he won, the good deeds he performed, the kids he coached, or the country he served in wartime.
It was a war in which many thousand innocents — often children younger than the boys Glenn had coached — were maimed and killed in horrific ways.
More than 58,000 American soldiers also died in that madness.
The ones who lived through it often returned with a survivor’s guilt so profound that it killed them in a tortuously slower way.
Most, by now, have been forgotten by all but those who were close to them in happier times.
And so this Veterans Day, my thoughts turn to a home-run swing and a popup, to the pitches I once threw with unbridled joy, and to a long-lost Pete Rose baseball card …
… and to the goodness of a guy who had been my coach.
